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188 assessment of climate change in the southwest united stateswhere adaptation planning is just beginning (California Ocean Protection Council 2007;California State Lands Commission 2009; Becker et al. 2012).Thus, while the state of California has been fairly progressive in adaptation planning(for example, with a Climate Adaptation Strategy, CalAdapt website, and the 2012sea-level rise study completed by the National Research Council), most adaptation actionswill be implemented locally or regionally (often with state and federal support andpermits). However, few local governments have begun taking steps to implement eithertheir own plans or the State’s existing recommendations.Barriers to adaptationSeveral studies have examined impediments or barriers to adaptation for individuals,communities, organizations, and entire nations. vi Increasing empirical evidence fromCalifornia strongly confirms the presence of barriers to adaptation in coastal communities(Hanak and Moreno 2011). In the above-mentioned 2005 survey of local jurisdictions,coastal managers considered their top barriers to adaptation management to belocal monetary constraints, insufficient staff resources, lack of supportive funding fromstate and federal sources, the all-consuming nature of currently pressing issues, and thelack of a legal mandate to undertake adaptation planning (Moser and Tribbia 2007).When asked again in 2011, the lack of funding to prepare and implement a plan, lack ofstaff resources to analyze relevant information, and the all-consuming currently pressingissues were again mentioned as overwhelming hurdles for local coastal professionals,followed (with far less frequency) by issues such as lack of public demand to takeadaptation action, lack of technical assistance from state or federal agencies, and lack ofcoordination among organizations (Moser and Ekstrom 2012). Case study research intwo cities and two counties in the San Francisco Bay Area found that institutional barriersdominate, closely followed by attitudinal barriers among decision makers. Funding-relatedbarriers were important, but ranked only third (Storlazzi and Griggs 2000;Griggs, Patsch, and Savoy 2005; Kildow and Colgan 2005; Moser and Ekstrom 2012).There is additional independent evidence that local jurisdictions vary considerablyin their technical expertise and capacity to engage in effective coastal land-use managementand that they do not use available management tools to the fullest extent possibleto improve coastal land management overall (Tang 2008, 2009). For example, expertsassert that the California Coastal Act and the Public Trust Doctrine are considerablyunderutilized in protecting public trust areas and the public interest (Caldwell and Segall2007; Peloso and Caldwell 2011). Thus, the persistence of this range of institutional,attitudinal, economic, and other adaptation barriers goes a long way toward accountingfor the low level of actual preparedness and lack of active implementation of adaptationstrategies in coastal California.The in-depth case studies conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area, however, alsoreveal that local communities have many opportunities, assets, and advantages that canhelp them avoid adaptation barriers in the first place, or which they can leverage in effortsto overcome those barriers they encounter (see Chapter 19, Box 19.4). Among themost important of these advantages and assets are people and existing plans and policiesthat facilitate and allow integration of adaptation and climate change (Moser andEkstrom 2012) (see also Chapter 18, Section 18.7).